AP Euro Chapter 18 Vocabulary

Comte de Buffon

A philosopher who argued that the human race originated as one whole, and their skin color changed due to different climate changes.

Thomas Hobbes

A philosopher who had a pesimistic view on human nature, believing that they are naturally cruel, and wrote the Levianthan, stating his beliefs, and that the only way to gain total alliegance is by having a strong absolute monarch.

David Hume

A leader in the Scottish enlightenment who was a religious skeptic, arguing that the mind is but a bundle of impressions.

Thomas Aquinas

A medieval theologian who mixed Aristotelian philosophy with Christian beliefs, believing that the earth was a fixed, motionless planet, with the sun, moon, and five planets being moved in perfect circles around the earth by angels, who lived in the heavens beyond the planets.

Eugenics

Pertaining to or causing improvement in the offspring produced.

Law of Universal Gravitation:

The idea that every body in the universe attracts every other body in a precise mathematical relationship, where the force of the object is directly proportional to the amount of matter within the object.

Radical Doubt

The idea that knowledge is practically impossible, as doubt exists, in variance, with every belief, therefore, nothing can be one hundred percent true.

Law of Inertia

The idea that rest isn't the natural state of objects, and that objects continue to move unless they are stopped by an external force.

Cartesian Dualism:

The idea that the world is composed entirely of two components, the matter, or physical, and the mind, or spiritual.

Frederick the Great

The ruler of prussia who built on the reforms of his father in an enlightened manner by making territorial advances, and encouraging enlightened thinking.

Catherine the Great

The russian enlightened monarch who continued the reforms of peter the great by encouraging westernization.

Denis Diderot

The writer of the enclapedia, which encouraged people to look at things in a specific way, therefore, it was bias,

Empiricism:

The general theory of inductive reasoning

Joseph II:

The successor of Maria Theresa in Austria who granted religious toleration to jews and protestants, and abolished serfdom.

Experimental Method

An idea that was elaborated, and consolidated by Galileo that suggested that rather than speculate about what might happen, conducting controlled experiments to prove, disprove, or conjure theories.

Social Contract

An implicit agreement among the members of a society to cooperate for social benefits, for example by sacrificing some individual freedom for state protection. Theories of a social contract became popular in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries among theorists such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as a means of explaining the origin of government and the obligations of subjects.

Enlightenment

An intellectual movement, emphasizing reason and individualism, as opposed to tradition, taking place in seventeenth, and eighteenth century Europe that included philosophers such as Locke, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, and many others.

Enlightened absolutism

Enlightened absolutism is a form of absolute monarchy or despotism in which rulers were influenced by the Enlightenment. Enlightened monarchs embraced the principles of the Enlightenment, especially its emphasis upon rationality, and applied them to their territories.

Salons

Regular social gatherings of the great and near-great in their elegant private drawing rooms, where philosophes came to debate, and exchange ideas.

Partition of Poland

: The separation of poland between russia and prussia.

Tycho Brahe

A Danish nobleman who took up astronomy after completing his studies, and was financed by the king of Denmark. He observed the planets and stars with the naked eye, and hypothesised that the planets all revolve around the sun, and that group all revolves around the earth moon system.

Ptolemy

A European astronomer and geographer, whose geographical synthesis influenced European exploration, and who worked out rules to explain the minor irregularities in the movement of planets, enabling people to better track them, and believe that their changing relationship influenced events on earth

Galileo Galilei:

A Florentine nobleman who became fascinated by mathematics, and conducted many controlled experiments to prove that a uniform force (gravity) produced a uniform acceleration. He discovered the four moons of jupiter, and upon writing Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World, was forced to recant, and apologize for his beliefs, or be tortured.

Rene Descartes

A French philosopher who believed that one should doubt everything that can be reasonably be doubted, and revolutionized mathematics by coming up with the idea that geometry and algebra are directly related, and can be expressed in the means of the other.

Aristotle

A Greek philosopher from the fourth century b.c.e, whose ideas were revived by medieval scholars, and were used until the early 1500s.

Rationalism:

A belief and theory that opinions and actions should be based on reason and knowledge rather than on religious belief or emotional response.

Nicholaus Copernicus

A clerical astronomer who believed that the sun was the center of the universe, with all the planets and stars rotating around it. He published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543, the year of his death, in fear of ridicule from other astronomers.

Madame Geoffrin

A famous salon hostess

Pierre Bayle

A french huguenot skeptic and intellectual who found refuge in the netherlands, and wrote the Historic and Critical Dictionary, which examined the persecutions of religious and political views.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A french philosopher who attacked rationalism and the corruptins of civilization.

Montesquieu

A french philosopher who criticized the beliefs and practices of his day in his work, The Persian Letters, and advocated for a separation of powers, with the political power divided among classes

Voltaire

A french philosopher who popularized the English methods of science and thinking, portrayed Louis XIV as a dignified leader of his age.

Natural Philosophy

A group of fundamentally new ways of understanding the natural world that emerged in the seventeenth century, with the people leading these changes calling themselves philosophers.

Philosophes

A group of intellectuals who brought about the enlightenment

Bernard de Fontenelle

A influential French popularizer who set out to make science witty and entertaining, leading him to write his novel, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, which described the change in cosmology in an entertaining way.

John Locke

A philosopher who believed that humans were naturally good, advocating these ideas in his essay, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and believed that everyone had natural rights, and that if the government doesn't protect them, people have the right to overthrow the government. He believed in tabula rasa, the idea that your mind is a blank slate and experiences shape your knowledge.

Immanuel Kant:

A prussian philosopher who published a pamphlet called, What is Enlightenment?, encouraging people to use their own understanding.

Noble Savage

A representative of primitive humankind as idealized in Romantic literature, symbolizing the innate goodness of humanity when free from the corrupting influence of civilization.

Carl von Linne

A swedish botanist who argued that nature was organized into a god given hierarchy.

Madame du Chatelet

A woman who was denied access into the French Academy of Sciences, and translated Newton's principals into french.

Isaac Newton

An English genius who was fascinated by alchemy, and highly religious, and over his life, and when returning his attention to physics in 1684, proposed the core laws of physics, his most famous being the law of universal gravitation.

Francis Bacon

An English politician and writer who rejected Aristotelian and medieval ideas, stating that new knowledge had to be pursued through empirical experimental reasoning, rather than speculation

Johannes Kepler

Brache's young assistant who was a brilliant mathematician, and using Brache's data proved that the planets move around the sun in an elliptical manner, that the planets move around the sun at varying speeds, and that the time it takes a planet to move around the sun is related to its distance from the sun.

Quintessence

Fifth essence that helped make up the 'spheres' or planets.

Implications of the Copernican Hypothesis

First, it put to rest the idea that the stars rotated around the world, that their rotation was only a product of the earth's rotation around the sun, secondly, it stated that the universe was immensely big, for the earth to move around the sun in one year, and lastly, it posed the question of, where does God's realm lye.

Moses Mendelssohn

Moses Mendelssohn was a German Jewish philosopher to whose ideas the Haskalah is indebted. Although himself a practicing orthodox Jew, he has been referred to as the father of Reform Judaism.

"Republic of Letters"

Republic of Letters is the long-distance intellectual community in the late 17th and 18th century in Europe and America. It fostered communication among the intellectuals of Age of Enlightenment, or "philosophes" as they were called in France.

Maria Theresa

Ruler of the Austrian throne who lost a lot of her territory to the Prussians, and wanted to introduce reforms to strengthen and make more efficient the beaurocracy.

Rococo

The art style dominating salons that displayed soft pastel, ornate interiors, sentimental portraits, and starry eyed lovers protected by hovering cupids.

Deism

The belief in a god, not necessarily the Christian God

Heliocentric

The belief that a fixed sun is the center of the universe, with the planets and stars rotating around the sun.

Skepticism

The belief that it is impossible for one thing to be one hundred percent true, and that there must be doubt in every fact.

Geocentric

The belief that the earth is the center of the universe, with all the planets and stars rotating around the earth.

Reading Revolution

The change in the way people read, from scriptural texts aloud, to rapidly, and silently reading all books to decide whether you agree with it or disagree.

Four Elements

The four elements that Aristotle believed to make up the sublunar world, the light elements (air and fire) that moved the world up, and the heavy elements (water and earth) that moved the world downward.

General will

The general will, made famous by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is a concept in political philosophy referring to the will of the people as a whole.

Sublunar

Within the moon's orbit, while being subject to its influence.

Emelian Pugachev

Yemelyan Ivanovich Pugachev was a pretender to the Russian throne who led a great Cossack insurrection during the reign of Catherine II. Alexander Pushkin wrote a notable history of the rebellion, The History of Pugachev, and he recounted some of the events in his novel The Captain's Daughter.